The present invention is related to patent application CL200800843 on 24 Mar. 2008, of the same applicant, which is cited as a reference herein. It provides an improved and corrected version of the invention already mentioned.
The development of controlled combustion chambers is not new, one of the first registered patents is the U.S. Pat. No. 2,821,067, on 28 Jan. 1958, entitled “Combustion chamber construction in a gas turbine engine”, by Hill, Henry C., whose primary objective was focused on defining the layout of the first internal combustion engines. These combustion chambers were designed to work based on fossil fuels.
Currently, the new environmental regulations and decreased global reserves of fossil fuels, are massifying the use of the so called “alternative fuels”. In this new scenario, it has been observed that the combustion chambers were developed in two main areas.
The first of these areas is related to equipment which might be used both for industrial and domestic energy production, associated with the use of alternative solid combustibles like biomass, such as wood, waste from agriculture and forestry industry, industrial and domestic solid residues, among others. Examples of these developments are the U.S. Pat. No. 4,270,930, dated on 2 Jun. 1981, and entitled “Clean combustion chamber fuel composition”, by Cambell Curtis B. and Peyla Richard J.; and the applications JP2006125726, dated on 18 May 2006, titled “Combustion chamber with window for wood pellet stove”, by Matsumoto Hiromasa, JP2006266546, dated on 5 Oct. 2006, titled “Wood pellet fuel combustion system”, by Tsuneo Kaneko and Omi Shuji, and JP2006150705, dated on 15 Jun. 2006, titled “Smoking/Drying apparatus and wood smoking/drying method”, by Muneda Yuji.
These documents describe mainly furnace and chimney in whose development has been worked in some cases to increase the thermodynamic efficiency of combustion and in other cases to minimize the emission of particulate matter. These generic combustion chambers have low operational flexibility as they have been developed to meet specific goals as provide energy for heating or cooking, and for the most part the design only allows the use of one type of fuel. None of these chambers have been designed with the purpose of being used as a laboratory chamber for research and independent or simultaneous analysis of both emissions from combustion, solid contaminants such as particulate matter (PM) and gaseous, to measure the thermodynamic efficiency of a given process of combustion.
The second area of development is in the research. In this field, we find scientific articles published in specialized journals in which it is reported a large number of controlled combustion chambers (“Combustion of a substitution fuel made of cardboard and polyethylene: influence of the mix characteristics experimental approach”, Fuel 83 (2004), Salvador et.al, “Semivolatile and volatile compounds from the pyrolysis and combustion of polyvinyl chloride”, J. Anal. Appl. Pyrolysis 74 (2005), Aracil et.al, “Estimation of gaseous products and particulate matter emission from garden biomass combustion in a simulation fire test chamber”, Atmospheric Environment 39 (2005), Kannan et.al, “On-Line Analysis of Gas-Phase Composition in the Combustion Chamber and Particle Emission Characteristics during Combustion of Wood and Waste in a Small Batch Reactor”, Environmental Science & Technology 39 (2005), Ferge et.al), though each one of them has been developed for specific purposes that each research group had raised, whereby, similar to the case of the development of equipment for domestic and industrial use, these combustion chambers have low operational flexibility and none of them is oriented to the research and simultaneous analysis of thermodynamic efficiency and emissions of a determined combustion process.